The ecommerce and courier revolution requires that a warehouse system that receives, stores, and despatches packages operates as efficiently as possible in order to satisfy customer expectations. A few additional and unnecessary minutes in a warehouse system could make the difference between commencing a journey today or tomorrow and the consequence of the latter could be the difference between a satisfied customer and a dissatisfied customer.
Furthermore, a delayed arrival of a purchase often equates to a lost future sale in view of the wide range of suppliers generally available to a customer carrying out e-purchases, for example over the Internet.
A modern day sorting and distribution centre may be required to handle well in excess of 100,000 packages per hour. An automated warehouse for sorting and despatching packages is a highly complex infrastructure as it needs to automatically combine packages for co-destination shipment and that complicates the sorting operation substantially. Packages are, for storage purposes, located in open topped boxes that can easily be handled by automated guided vehicles that do automated placement and retrieval in a storage racking system.
In a modern courier and e-commerce distribution centre, the time scale is rather short and the applicant has worked on the basis that ultra-short term storage would be up to about 10 minutes; short term storage would be from about 10 to about 30 minutes; medium term storage would be from about 30 to about 60 minutes; and longer term storage would be from about 1 hour to about 24 hours. In courier facilities, any longer term storages may optionally be routed to a different zone or warehouse system that may be attached to, or form part of, the same greater storage facility.
In e-commerce fulfillment centres, factory parts stores and retail distribution warehouses, the system may be used to store items for a substantially longer period of time, ranging from days to weeks and even months in the case of infrequently purchased items.
Whilst sorting and optimization algorithms are limited only by the clock speed of the super computers on which they run, implementing the physical movement of the packages requires complex mechanisms and storage solutions. Current linear storage solutions do not permit dynamic reorganisation and tracking of packages. An automated storage and retrieval system operating only in vertical rows and consequently only able to manoeuvre in a single horizontal direction whilst operating in said rows, does not allow for packages to be simultaneously placed and/or retrieved and/or rearranged. Existing automated guided vehicles that place and retrieve packages from a storage racking system are only able to move on a single track on a particular level and can only be moved between levels by lifts at the ends of the tracks. Thus, two automated guided vehicles are unable to operate at the same level in the same row at the same time as they are unable to overtake or pass one another.
A commercially available system of this general nature is that produced by VANDERLANDE INDUSTRIES of the Netherlands.
United States published patent application no US20090265031 describes an example of that general type of warehouse system too.
An aim of the present invention is to improve economies of scale by overcoming, at least to some extent, limitations of existing systems that are known to the applicant and to enable or enhance the speed of amalgamation of the shipment of online sales with point-to-point courier services, as may be required.
The preceding discussion of the background to the invention is intended only to facilitate an understanding of the present invention. It should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgment or admission that any of the material referred to was part of the common general knowledge in the art as at the priority date of the application.
In this specification the term “box” or its plural “boxes” is intended to mean any container with or without a lid and includes what are commonly referred to as crates and other open or closed storage containers.